Re: NBC: An Inconvenient Truth


"SMBalloon" <smballoon@xxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:1cfk62dv48skf2bnrhpmq32l4ucja4pkqh@xxxxxxxxxx
On Tue, 16 May 2006 09:16:14 -0500, "gumboman" <noemail@xxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

Those who think it doesn't exist are mostly paid by global corporations to
produce reports that would keep the pressure off the corporations. I'm not
aware of any top-notch, independent scientist who has written there is
nothing to the phenomenon.

There aren't many independent scientists. They all get funding from
somewhere, usually from governments. And those who don't tow the line
of global warming are ostracized and they usually won't see any
government funding.

This is nonsense. It wasn't until this administration carried out its coup
that scientists worried about the political ramifications of any research.
It's always been the case that in the process of fighting for scarce
research dollars that decisions had to be made but it wasn't until 2000 that
politics played any part in the process.


In a nutshell, long-term global climatic
predictions are a very complicated undertaking. And the computer
models in place don't come close to the complexity of what actually
takes place.

In a nutshell what is taking place isn't all that complicated. It's very
basic chemistry and should be easily understood by anyone with a basic
understanding of the subject. The computer models that describe the long
term interactions and results may be complicated but we don't need that type
of analysis to understand that if the northern glaciers melt and seas rise
20 feet that significant numbers who live in coastal areas will become
refugees. A basic understanding of volume is sufficient to see why the sea
will rise.



That doesn't mean that global warming is not being
driven by man-made activities. What is does mean is that perhaps
people should take pause before believing that it's an indisputable
fact that global warming is being driven by man-made activities.

It IS an indisputable fact at this point.


Just
35 or so years ago, the so-called indisputable science showed us
entering a new ice age, and those scientists who didn't buy into that
were the ones who had their motives questioned.


I've seen you make this type of remark before and I don't remember this
being the case. In fact, it seems as if you are dead ass wrong. I called a
couple of friends who also remember nothing like this occurring,
particularly the assertion that it was scientists who were having their
motives questioned if they didn't subscribe to some 'indisputable' science.
It seems as if most of what you may be referring to were articles in non
scientific journals that didn't go through any peer review process and I
think you are conveniently forgetting that even those articles were talking
about long term forecasts (thousands of years) and were done without benefit
of present day measurements on the warming which is undoubtedly a short term
problem.

Here is a web site where someone has apparently heard of the assertions you
are making and is actively encouraging anyone to send in any peer reviewed
papers from that time in which a working scientist asserted in the paper
anything close to what you have said. I'll post a few of his remarks for
those that don't want to go through the whole web site:

http://www.wmconnolley.org.uk/sci/iceage/

+++++++++++
To clarify a little: I am interested in "Was an imminent Ice Age predicted
in the '70's by scientists, in scientific journals?". That means articles in
scientific journals and reputable books. I am not particularly interested in
what appeared in the popular press or on TV and do not intend to discuss it
here (but see context), since I do not regard these as reliable sources for
scientific information.
Note that many of the oh-there-was-an-ice-age-predicted type articles tend
to focus on non-science articles for their sources: newsweek, for example.
This is cheating on their part. Newsweek isn't science, of course. If
newsweek was quoting peer-reviewed journals, then they should go back to
those.

We also need to know what we mean by "imminent". Since the question arises
in the context of the greenhouse gas/climate change debate, "imminent" is a
timescale comparable to greenhouse-type timescales: ie, the next century or
so. See below for my take on long-term predictions.

+++++++++

+++++++++++

The purpose of this page is to provide a counter to the mythology that
"journals were stuffed full of articles predicting an imminent ice age in
the '70's". An article by the John Birch Society seems to be an example of
the kind of thing [oops, they've changed the page! I should have copied the
old one... happily, JS points me to: the web.archive.org's archive of it]
(see also "The New Australian", or http://www.ff.org/library/whatsnext.html
[local cache]), and it even appears in milder form in the 1999 Reith
lectures. The relevance of this claim is that "greenhouse sceptics" are fond
of claiming that "all scientists" were predicting cooling a decade ago and
now they've switched to warming. However, closer probing reveals few of
these articles.

The argument has two very seperate strands: the "orbital-forcing" strand,
wherein the cooling was to occur as a result of variations in the Earths
orbit around the sun, and the "aerosols" strand, which supposed cooling in
response to a massive increase in the aerosol loading of the atmosphere. In
fact there is a variant of the first idea, rapid climate change during
interglacials, see Flohn, 1979.

Let me say now that I have no quarrel with the large volume of perfectly
sensible scientific literature that examines the Milankovich hypothesis and
the probable connection between orbital forcing and past glaciations. The
coincidence of the periods of the orbital forcing and the ice ages seems so
close that (in common with received opinion on this subject) I believe that
orbital variations have caused the ice age timing over the last, say, 3 Myr.
Hays et al, Science, v194, #4270, p1121, 10/Dec/1976 is an excellent paper
on this subject (see below). It is worth pointing out, though, that although
the coincidence in timing virtually compels belief in the connection, there
is still a problem in that the strongest response (at 100 kyr) corresponds
to the weakest forcing, and as far as I am aware this problem has not been
resolved. Nor do I take issue with the contention that, in the absence of
anthropogenic forcing, it is natural to predict a gradual return to ice age
conditions in the future (though quite how long that might be is uncertain.
The "all interglacials last 10 kyr" (or 12, or whatever) idea is wrong.
Various sources (Loutre and Berger) say that due to the predicted orbital
configurations, the prediction (in the absence of anthro forcing) is for
this interglacial to last 50 kyr or more. Jan Hollan has a page showing some
nice graphs about that at
http://amper.ped.muni.cz/gw/articles/html.format/orb_forc.html. What I do
assert, though, is that predictions for the immediate future (immediate in
this context being the next few centuries) need to include anthropogenic
forcing from CO2 increases in order to be meaningful, and that people were
aware of this in the 1970's. Simple efforts to combine anthropogenic and
Milankovich forcings are confounded by the problem mentioned above, and I
believe (no ref. available) that current radiative forcing from CO2 release
already exceeds that from Milankovich forcing. Any attempt, made in the
light of todays knowledge, to predict the likely course of climate for the
next several thousand years would need to include an
assumption/prediction/model of future CO2 levels, which at the moment seems
impossible over that time span.



++++++++++++++++++++++



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